


drag me to that dark place

by nonbinarywithaknife (littleboxes)



Series: me sobbing about critical role [75]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Tragedy, Drowning, F/M, Gen, Ghost!Veth, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-15 04:02:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18490936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleboxes/pseuds/nonbinarywithaknife
Summary: “The hooded woman’s reincarnation spell goes awry. Veth doesn’t return to life. But she doesn’t quite stay dead, either.”





	drag me to that dark place

**Author's Note:**

> daily dose of nott sadness, courtesy of me.  
> but seriously: trigger warning for descriptions of drowning, murder, suffocation, and briefly someone thinking they're going crazy

_When Veth wakes up, she’s standing in the river. It takes her a second to realize that she doesn’t feel wet. Or cold. Or- anything, really. She looks down, and the reflection is that of a gaunt halfling woman, in a ripped, dirtied, and darkly stained dress, who has bite and scratch marks up and down her arms and crisscrossing her neck. She realizes with a start that’s it’s_ **_her_** _, in the water, and before the panic can consume her wholly, the world goes black._

* * *

It’s been just over a week since he woke up in a temple healing room without Veth, and Yeza is starting to realize that his wife isn’t- isn’t coming back. He wants to hang onto hope, so, so badly, but- he can’t. He doesn’t have just himself to think about- he can’t do that to Luc, can’t dangle an ever thinning thread of hope in front of him.

Yeza gets up off the sofa (It has a truly horrific floral pattern, and Veth had instantly declared her love for it when they’d been furniture shopping for their home) and walks over to one of the living room shelves Veth had claimed for her collections. He can’t help a melancholic smile when he sees the figurines, made of all sorts of materials, most chipped or broken in some way, but lovingly placed, each one.

* * *

 

 _Veth is in- her home? She doesn’t know how she got here. When she sees Yeza, sitting on the sofa, holding Luc to his breast as he cries, she rushes over. She tries to rest a hand on Luc’s shoulder, desperate to comfort her_ **_son_** _, but instead, her hand passes straight through. Luc shivers, the tiniest movement, and she steps back. Watches, as Yeza comforts him, his whispers ringing in her ears. “I know you miss her, I do too, it will be alright. There, there, let it out.”_

_She stays staring at the sofa long into the night._

* * *

Yeza is standing in front of their his dresser mirror, trying to muster up some will to shave, when he sees her. The reflection of a halfling woman, with a pallid, sunken face, staring at him with dead, colorless eyes, whose neck is painted with bruises. When he blinks, she’s gone. He rests a hand over his heart, tries to soothe the hummingbird rhythm. He opens the Apothecary anyway. He almost manages to forget the grotesque vision, until a Crownsguard enters his shop, and heads right for the counter.

“Yeza Brenatto?” she asks, and he nods. “I’m afraid I need you to come down to the Temple. There’s a body you’re needed to identify.”

* * *

 

_The body that lays on the stone table, in the Temple’s cold cellar morgue, looks like a funhouse mirror reflection. Everything is warped- Her skin is bloated, and instead of the dark brown she is used to, there are instead mottled greens and purples and blues and greys. She looks like an undead horror told to children to corral them into bed at night. She can’t bear to look for very long, and as her distress mounts, her vision starts to grey. She can do nothing before everything is black once more._

* * *

 

After rushing Luc to Edith’s (Thank the Gods for Edith; always so kind to them, especially now) Yeza follows the Crownsguard to the local temple of the Raven Queen. The only other time he’d been here was for his father’s funeral, and that was not a memory he liked to revisit often. His stomach is churning all the way down to the cellar. The guard stood watch at the door as he approached the body. The sheet was folded away from the face, and Yeza freezes as he looks at it. It isn’t just his wife on the table. No, lying there was the the woman he’d seen in the mirror this morning.

* * *

 

Yeza can only be thankful that Luc never sees her. He doesn’t know if that means he _is_ going crazy, or if, if it’s some sort of spell? Or his grief manifesting itself? He only knows it’s not a trick of the light, and that she’s never once said anything to him. He sees her everywhere; in the corner of his eyes, reflected in mirrors and pans and metallic trinkets, one of many faces in busy crowds. She never speaks, and she never stays.

* * *

 

 _She watches him. She doesn’t remember why. Doesn’t remember what made her the way she is, doesn’t remember what she looked like Before. The only things she knows are: the feeling of a river roaring down her throat, of screams being swallowed, of needle-hands on her neck until nothing- and the overwhelming need to_ **_protect_** _._


End file.
